August Brown

Writer

August Brown has covered pop music and nightlife at the Los Angeles Times since 2005. He has written extensively on electronic dance music, hip-hop, K-Pop, noise music and many other genres, and can reliably locate the best dive bar within a one-mile radius of any point in L.A. County. Once, as a wiseacre adolescent, he was almost cast opposite Burt Reynolds in an early '90s buddy-cop comedy, and really wishes that had panned out.

Recent Articles

By day, Sherry Lee works for the photography supply store Freestyle Photo in Hollywood. So when she opened her new downtown Los Angeles vinyl-only record store, Pop Obscure Records, with husband and partner Dustin Lane in July, she was well acquainted with the trials of running a retail outlet...

Blood Orange’s Devonte Hynes is often called an heir to Prince. But on Wednesday night at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel, he was just as much an inheritor of Gene Kelly. During the band’s performance of “You’re Not Good Enough,” a soft-funk single that sounds like the smooth station KOST-FM (103.5)...

Typically scheduled near the end of the long, hot summer festival season, FYF Fest can be a tough sell every year for music fans who’ve spent the previous several months watching bands while standing under a broiling sun. That said, the lineup for the latest edition — set for Saturday and Sunday...

Metallica has returned with its first new album since 2008. The veteran group announced “Hardwired...To Self-Destruct,” its first non-collaborative record since 2008’s “Death Magnetic.” The band’s last LP was a head-scratcher of a collaborative concept album, 2011’s “Lulu,” with the late Lou Reed....

We’re a decade into the EDM boom of the 2000s. So why hasn’t there been a great American television show or movie set within the scene? EDM – and all the raptures, perils and outsize personalities that come with it – would seem a natural setting for film. Its exaggerated stage productions are science...

Steven Zhu’s career has risen in reverse. His breakthrough 2014 single “Faded,” a lithe, late-night house cut, took off before anyone knew anything about the artist going by the name Zhu. When the Bay Area-raised, now L.A.-based producer earned a Grammy nomination for it in 2015, no fan had yet...

Nick Jonas is currently on a joint tour with Demi Lovato — and by all accounts, it’s quite a duet. But he also made a just-as-auspicious L.A. debut of sorts over the weekend at the Sundance Next Fest at the Ace Hotel. “Goat,” a new feature from director Andrew Neel (out in theaters and on-demand...

The rapper Killer Mike, one half of the duo Run the Jewels, had been one of Bernie Sanders’ most outspoken advocates in the campaign. It’s clear that Sanders’ loss still doesn’t sit well with him, and he’s immensely dissatisfied with the remaining candidates. In remarks to TMZ, Killer Mike said...